moar reveals..
https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/emb6am-mon-judges-who-have-opposed-trump-approved-jack-smith-surveillance
Jack Smith team got anti-Trump judges to approve phone monitoring, didn’t reveal lawyers as targets
Unsealed court records reveal at least two Obama-appointed judges often openly critical of President Trump signed off on monitoring communications for top Trump aide Susie Wiles. Smith never disclosed to the judges that he was planning on spying on lawyers. The results tracked calls made to and from lawmakers, other lawyers and journalists.
Ex-prosecutor Jack Smith's team got permission to monitor the phone of Donald Trump's top aide from two federal judges openly critical of the president and did not reveal in their written request to those judges it would be secretly tracking contacts with criminal defense lawyers, according to freshly unsealed court records.
The documents made public Monday by the White House Government Transparency Task Force include two applications by the former special counsel to use a pen register and a tap and trace device to monitor the incoming and outgoing calls of current White House chief of staff Susie Wiles’s phone while she led Trump’s fundraising operation at the SAVE America PAC.
Pen register and tap and trace devices are used to gather private data on telephone calls, including when and where the calls were made, from whom to whom, and the length of the calls. While they do not include the actual contents of the calls, they often provide investigators with valuable information.
Both applications came in winter and spring 2023 after Trump announced he was running for president and as Smith investigated allegations that the former president had mishandled classified documents after the conclusion of his first term. The filings are redacted, but an administration official told Just the News that Wiles was the subject of Smith’s requests.
In the first application, which was submitted to the District of Columbia court in February 2023, Smith provides a glimpse into why his team was looking into Wiles’s communications.
"Historical telephone connection records provided by AT&T revealed that beginning at least as early as May 2022, the Subject Phone Number was used to communicate with subjects and witnesses shortly before and/or after they spoke with the Government in connection with this criminal investigation,” Smith wrote.
The following day, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, senior judge in the District of Columbia, signed an order approving the application. “The Court finds that an attorney for the government […] has certified that the information likely to be obtained by such an installation and use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation,” Howell wrote.
Howell was appointed by President Barack Obama and has ruled against several of Trump’s policy directives in his current term.
For instance, Howell struck down his executive order targeting Perkins Coie, a law firm involved in the genesis of the Trump-Russia collusion allegations. She ruled it violated the First, Fifth and Sixth Amendments by punishing the firm for its work for Hillary Clinton and its election litigation. The Justice Department sought her recusal, citing her remarks in the Jan. 6 cases, but Howell refused.
Howell railed against Trump, saying that “No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue […] and in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.’”
Howell has been a central figure in Trump-related litigation for nearly a decade. As chief judge of the D.C. federal court from 2016 to 2023, she oversaw grand juries used by Russia collusion Special Counsel Robert Mueller and by investigators probing efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
In March 2023, she pierced the attorney-client privilege between Trump and one of his lawyers, Evan Corcoran. In that case, she relied on the crime-fraud exception, forcing more testimony in the classified documents case. She also enforced Smith’s warrant for Trump’s Twitter account and fined the company $350,000 for slow compliance.
A second application to extend the pen register and tap and trace monitoring of Wiles’s phone came in April and was approved by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, another Washington DC-based jurist famously critical of Trump, the court records show.
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